Looking for effective speech-to-text programs for my business. Does anybody know of any? Would there be one already built into Windows 8?

Also, would it work for two people? For example, I would like to use it for radio interviews and have a transcript of two people talking.

Tsf O

August 29, 2013 at 4:58 pm

Windows 8 do have a built in - VR following is the link to set it up:

windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/set-up-speech-recognition

Oron Joffe

August 25, 2013 at 6:27 pm

As Harshit says, the best speech recognition software is Dragon, but it needs to be trained in the speaker's voice, and will only work with a single voice at a time, It can do a pretty good job. However, it will be uselsess for transcribing interviews.

I've delved into this subject myself on a number of ocassions but sadly, although there has been very active research in this field for decades, and there is still nothing that can reliably transcribe multiple voices, particularly if they are using continuous speech (that is, there are certain automated systems that operate over the phone and will recognize words or short messages, but not long passages).

To get an idea of where the technology is at, watch a Youtube clip and turn on the "auto captions" option for the video. The mashed-up mess you see is pretty much as good a result as you'll get from any software.